[Music]
[Music]
so a few months ago we had in what my
house counts as a minor crisis my tall
17 year old son had actually outgrown
his bed his feet were hanging off of the
edge and so I being a dutiful parent
went online and started looking up
different mattresses that both could fit
his frame and then fit into his bedroom
and in the end we decided that he should
just muddle through the next year until
he goes to college and we told him to
sleep diagonally across his bed until
then thank you it was it expecting a
clap for that but I’ll take it but that
didn’t stop the ads over the next few
weeks every time I went on a news
article on my phone I realized I kept
seeing the same ads
kind of following me around reminding me
of my decision to make a muddle through
the next year and we’ve all encountered
this we go online we look up something
that we need or we’re concerned about or
someplace that we need to go and somehow
or another that information shows up in
an ad and in many ways this is part of
our bargain and going online we see ads
sometimes slightly personalized an
exchange we get cheaper if not free
content but that’s not all the
information that they’re getting they
might know your location information who
your contacts are your Facebook friends
they might grab your text messages or
emails and this information can then be
used perhaps when you apply for a job
later on or determine insurance and the
type of insurance that you get and it’s
the secondary use of information outside
of any bargain that we struck that
really causes consumers concern when
they go and fill out surveys but
business has an answer this is a brand
new business model this free flow of
information is necessary for market
efficiency and oh by the way they claim
consumers aren’t really that concerned
because we keep going online and
downloading apps I have to admit when I
hear this I have a tendency to just tune
it out like white noise I almost don’t
even hear it
when I is a professor of business ethics
when I’m doing my research on privacy
online I offer different scenarios about
how information is both gathered and
then used and consumers consistently say
this does not meet their privacy
expectations and is a breach of trust so
what’s going on business is telling us
this is a brave new world that
everything is different now and
consumers look out into the cloud out
into the abyss not knowing what’s going
on but just knowing that we don’t like
it so what I’m gonna do today is I’m
gonna reaffirm our instincts when it
comes to privacy online I’m gonna argue
that much of what we need to know about
privacy we actually learned in middle
school and finally that we need to
demand more out of business when it
comes to respecting our privacy so let’s
go back to what for many of us was an
unfortunate time in our life middle
school so every every day in middle
school you had some new nugget of
information who you like who you don’t
like who your crush is whether you like
your parents whether or not you’re going
to tell your parents you don’t like them
or not you go to school you share that
information with a friend that you trust
but because this is middle school
somehow that information comes back to
you by way of a gossip and that gossip
shares information when you would not
when you’re talking to a new friend or
talking to that crush or about to take a
test the gossip shares information when
it’s not in your interest and this is
actually what makes them a gossip and
not a friend so we had two characters we
worried about middle school first was
that trusted confidant that actually
shared the information but second we
worried about the gossip using
information when it’s not in our
interest but there was a third character
we worried about in middle school and
that’s the eavesdropper someone who
listened in when they weren’t invited if
you were like me that oh God is me in
middle school well that’s nice you had
two younger brothers lurking around the
house listening in to every one of my
conversations oh they’re adorable aren’t
they that just it only let them get away
with things for way too long so they
they would listen into any of my
conversations definitely when they
weren’t invited they pick up the phone
extension when they had when we had
phone extensions and they would listen
in to all my conversations so this was
the third
the character that we had to worry about
in middle school first was that trusted
confidant that actually somehow shared
the information second was the gossip
who gathered up the information but then
uses it when it’s not in your interest
and third are these eavesdroppers who
were listening in and trying to listen
in on conversations when they weren’t
invited I’m not going out in a limb when
I say that middle school was less than
ideal and we always strive for more than
middle school and it’s worth considering
an example where we didn’t have to deal
with these types of characters when we
were sharing information and the three
musketeers is a classic book about good
friends and trusted confidants and the
protagonist of the story d’Artagnan is
not a friend he he is a friend he’s not
a musketeer and he asked one of the
Musketeers when he finds out that he’s a
royalty do the other two know that
you’re a boil tee and Athos says no they
don’t I wanted them to see me and not my
title and he said please don’t say
anything and d’Artagnan says of course
not it’s not my story to tell
consider how different that is from what
we experienced in middle school it’s not
my story to tell here we have a
situation where information is shared
and yet protected its shared with one
but not everyone and this isn’t a novel
or a new idea this book was written in
1844 and it’s set in the 1600s and so
the Three Musketeers in many ways offers
a counter example to what we had to
experience in middle school and the
three musketeers we have information
shared yet protected from gossips and
eavesdroppers so let’s go online and see
where we are when we go online we share
information about who we like and what
we like what we’re worried about what
our concerns are where we need to go in
the future travel plans that we might
have whether we need a mattress we share
that information with a website or an
app that we trust and that information
gets shared sometimes by the website or
the app but many times we have trackers
eavesdropping on us this purple box
highlights the 39 trackers on this
website it knows how I got to this
website where I go next
it knows what I read on the website
where I click through what I’m looking
at
the search terms I put in and it’s not
particular to any one website here’s
another website with 20
crackers same same type of trackers
they’re called beacons or web beacons
cookies or super cookies these are the
equivalent of my two younger brothers
listening in when I was in Middle School
only now there are 39 of them following
me around online but these trackers
actually share information they sell it
to what you might have heard of as data
aggregators or data brokers and these
data aggregators and data brokers
actually pulled together little bits and
pieces of information from across
different websites from across different
apps they might grab your location data
they might grab your grocery store
purchases from offline and when they
kind of pull all this stuff together it
paints a very robust picture of who we
are it tells our story and so here’s an
example here’s my story from just two
days in October this is not from a data
aggregator this is from just the
keywords in my web history and you can
tell quite a bit about me from just two
days so the biggest word is teenagers I
have three teenagers that are like this
three teenagers in my house right now
and I they generate a lot of concerns
for me online look them up fly you’ll
also see coffee not coincidence and then
yogas in there you can see I looked up
information about the tech rehearsal
from the TED talk there was a swarm of
bees in a public school near me so this
story is then used to gossip about us
it’s sold to companies and used when
it’s not in our interest it’s used to
sort us to categorize us to market to us
to advertise to us it might be used to
guess whether you’re a depressed teenage
girl open to certain types of
advertising are you in economic distress
and a good target for credit card ads or
for-profit college ads have you been
looking at medical symptoms and can they
offer you a cure these are not our idle
kind of neighborhood middle school
gossips these are professional gossips
they are selling this information to law
enforcement companies that want a
product market to us to future employers
to politicians that want your vote so we
have the same characters we dealt with
in middle school we had this trusted app
or trusted website that we
initially shared the information with we
had those trackers in the purple box
eavesdropping listening in when they’re
not invited and here we have a gossip
the data aggregator using information
when it’s not in our interest it’s worth
remembering why our parents warned us
about the dangers of middle school and
why scholars from law scholars to
philosophers to computer scientists warn
us about privacy online right now and
this is because privacy is best
understood as our ability to both share
information while having it protected we
share information knowing who’s going to
get that information and how it’s going
to be used this is important because we
need to share information with people
that we trust both like athos worried
about his royalty status being too loud
of a signal for friends but also we need
to trust the other party not to use that
information to harm us to manipulate us
or make us vulnerable and this is
important because sharing information is
actually key to developing who we are
it’s how we process events we talk
through them it’s how we develop
different types of relationships form
groups and social bonds it’s how we
develop a sense of autonomy if the
opposite were the case if the only way
to protect our information to risk
withhold it keep it away from society
this in many ways goes against our
instincts and being social and is
actually one of the worst punishments we
can devise is to force someone to
withdraw from society or even worse to
kind of go into solitary so you can see
we have this tension we have these
reasonable expectations to know how
information is being gathered and used
and yet we have a business model that
assumes that we don’t care the market
approach sends something from a business
school is to stop feeding the gossips
this is the same advice your parents
probably gave you in middle school so if
we go back to that website that I showed
you earlier if I actually turn on the
blocker this is actually a product
called gostrey as in witches and ghosts
gostrey there are many other blockers
out there that you can they’re free I
can like to make my brothers go away but
I can I make the ad go away but more
importantly I actually make the number
of track hoes get smaller and then the
ones that are there or
greyed out meaning they’re being blocked
so I’m blocking the eavesdroppers from
listening in now second we can actually
withhold our business from companies
that we find to be untrustworthy and
this actually works in 2016 a number of
websites tried to force users like
myself to turn off these products these
blockers and enough people turned around
and walked away that the websites had to
reverse their policy so with both
holding our business from companies we
find on trustworthy works in the long
run but those gossips are tough because
we don’t have a relationship with the
data aggregators so it’s hard for us to
pull our information back but I’m going
to say two things that should give us
some hope first they don’t admit this
but companies know that
Trust is necessary for sharing
information they know this because
companies themselves develop
relationships like joint ventures and
alliances and partnerships and they
spend a ton of time and money doing it
that allows them to share information
like their forecasts what they need in
the future what their concerns are what
there’s going on in their business this
trust is necessary to protect that type
of information because this is key that
type of information can be used to make
to manipulate them to make them
vulnerable in the marketplace so this
argument that the free flow of
information is necessary for market
efficiency is an argument business only
uses for consumer data this is not an
argument they use for themselves so we
need to put that argument into context
and I just mean ignore it we should just
ignore when they say that second we’ve
actually heard many of these arguments
before we as society call out bad
behavior and businesses first response
is no no no this is necessary for our
business model we hear this right now
all the time with privacy and we
actually heard it decades ago with
pollution so when the Environmental
Protection Agency was first started in
1970 it was called the worst enemy of
business the clean air and the Clean
Water Act were called unreasonable and
unrealistic any attempt at Technica
regulating pollution was considered
technically impossible and would cause
business to lose hundreds if not
thousands of jobs they said so how is
that a river on fire
hopefull well those same companies that
were actually in denial about the role
of pollution eventually became compliant
with the clean air and the Clean Water
Act and the best started using
sustainability as a source of innovation
and a competitive advantage so we need
to see these initial arguments that
businesses making as just the process by
which they reconcile their current
practices with the social norms and
values that we espouse so the companies
that are in denial about their role with
privacy eventually will become
respectful and compliant with our
privacy expectations and the best will
actually use privacy as a source of
innovation and a competitive advantage
so our role in making that hope I just
described a reality that cloud we look
out into that abyss is actually made up
of very distinct characters we need to
identify the trusted confidants we need
to identify the eavesdroppers those
trackers and we need to identify the
gossips the data aggregators this allows
us to use different tactics for each and
it really lets us focus in on those data
aggregators gossiping about us and using
our information when it’s not in our
interest we have reasonable expectations
to know how information is both gathered
and used this allows us to develop as
individuals and develop relationships we
need to demand more out of companies to
respect those expectations rather than
undermine them we should reward
companies that are trustworthy and we
need to block those who are not and
finally our response our response when
we hear about companies who want to
eavesdrop on us and gossip about us our
response needs to be that’s not your
story to tell
thank you very much
[Applause]
[Music]
so a few months ago we had in what my
house counts as a minor crisis my tall
17 year old son had actually outgrown
his bed his feet were hanging off of the
edge and so I being a dutiful parent
went online and started looking up
different mattresses that both could fit
his frame and then fit into his bedroom
and in the end we decided that he should
just muddle through the next year until
he goes to college and we told him to
sleep diagonally across his bed until
then thank you it was it expecting a
clap for that but I’ll take it but that
didn’t stop the ads over the next few
weeks every time I went on a news
article on my phone I realized I kept
seeing the same ads
kind of following me around reminding me
of my decision to make a muddle through
the next year and we’ve all encountered
this we go online we look up something
that we need or we’re concerned about or
someplace that we need to go and somehow
or another that information shows up in
an ad and in many ways this is part of
our bargain and going online we see ads
sometimes slightly personalized an
exchange we get cheaper if not free
content but that’s not all the
information that they’re getting they
might know your location information who
your contacts are your Facebook friends
they might grab your text messages or
emails and this information can then be
used perhaps when you apply for a job
later on or determine insurance and the
type of insurance that you get and it’s
the secondary use of information outside
of any bargain that we struck that
really causes consumers concern when
they go and fill out surveys but
business has an answer this is a brand
new business model this free flow of
information is necessary for market
efficiency and oh by the way they claim
consumers aren’t really that concerned
because we keep going online and
downloading apps I have to admit when I
hear this I have a tendency to just tune
it out like white noise I almost don’t
even hear it
when I is a professor of business ethics
when I’m doing my research on privacy
online I offer different scenarios about
how information is both gathered and
then used and consumers consistently say
this does not meet their privacy
expectations and is a breach of trust so
what’s going on business is telling us
this is a brave new world that
everything is different now and
consumers look out into the cloud out
into the abyss not knowing what’s going
on but just knowing that we don’t like
it so what I’m gonna do today is I’m
gonna reaffirm our instincts when it
comes to privacy online I’m gonna argue
that much of what we need to know about
privacy we actually learned in middle
school and finally that we need to
demand more out of business when it
comes to respecting our privacy so let’s
go back to what for many of us was an
unfortunate time in our life middle
school so every every day in middle
school you had some new nugget of
information who you like who you don’t
like who your crush is whether you like
your parents whether or not you’re going
to tell your parents you don’t like them
or not you go to school you share that
information with a friend that you trust
but because this is middle school
somehow that information comes back to
you by way of a gossip and that gossip
shares information when you would not
when you’re talking to a new friend or
talking to that crush or about to take a
test the gossip shares information when
it’s not in your interest and this is
actually what makes them a gossip and
not a friend so we had two characters we
worried about middle school first was
that trusted confidant that actually
shared the information but second we
worried about the gossip using
information when it’s not in our
interest but there was a third character
we worried about in middle school and
that’s the eavesdropper someone who
listened in when they weren’t invited if
you were like me that oh God is me in
middle school well that’s nice you had
two younger brothers lurking around the
house listening in to every one of my
conversations oh they’re adorable aren’t
they that just it only let them get away
with things for way too long so they
they would listen into any of my
conversations definitely when they
weren’t invited they pick up the phone
extension when they had when we had
phone extensions and they would listen
in to all my conversations so this was
the third
the character that we had to worry about
in middle school first was that trusted
confidant that actually somehow shared
the information second was the gossip
who gathered up the information but then
uses it when it’s not in your interest
and third are these eavesdroppers who
were listening in and trying to listen
in on conversations when they weren’t
invited I’m not going out in a limb when
I say that middle school was less than
ideal and we always strive for more than
middle school and it’s worth considering
an example where we didn’t have to deal
with these types of characters when we
were sharing information and the three
musketeers is a classic book about good
friends and trusted confidants and the
protagonist of the story d’Artagnan is
not a friend he he is a friend he’s not
a musketeer and he asked one of the
Musketeers when he finds out that he’s a
royalty do the other two know that
you’re a boil tee and Athos says no they
don’t I wanted them to see me and not my
title and he said please don’t say
anything and d’Artagnan says of course
not it’s not my story to tell
consider how different that is from what
we experienced in middle school it’s not
my story to tell here we have a
situation where information is shared
and yet protected its shared with one
but not everyone and this isn’t a novel
or a new idea this book was written in
1844 and it’s set in the 1600s and so
the Three Musketeers in many ways offers
a counter example to what we had to
experience in middle school and the
three musketeers we have information
shared yet protected from gossips and
eavesdroppers so let’s go online and see
where we are when we go online we share
information about who we like and what
we like what we’re worried about what
our concerns are where we need to go in
the future travel plans that we might
have whether we need a mattress we share
that information with a website or an
app that we trust and that information
gets shared sometimes by the website or
the app but many times we have trackers
eavesdropping on us this purple box
highlights the 39 trackers on this
website it knows how I got to this
website where I go next
it knows what I read on the website
where I click through what I’m looking
at
the search terms I put in and it’s not
particular to any one website here’s
another website with 20
crackers same same type of trackers
they’re called beacons or web beacons
cookies or super cookies these are the
equivalent of my two younger brothers
listening in when I was in Middle School
only now there are 39 of them following
me around online but these trackers
actually share information they sell it
to what you might have heard of as data
aggregators or data brokers and these
data aggregators and data brokers
actually pulled together little bits and
pieces of information from across
different websites from across different
apps they might grab your location data
they might grab your grocery store
purchases from offline and when they
kind of pull all this stuff together it
paints a very robust picture of who we
are it tells our story and so here’s an
example here’s my story from just two
days in October this is not from a data
aggregator this is from just the
keywords in my web history and you can
tell quite a bit about me from just two
days so the biggest word is teenagers I
have three teenagers that are like this
three teenagers in my house right now
and I they generate a lot of concerns
for me online look them up fly you’ll
also see coffee not coincidence and then
yogas in there you can see I looked up
information about the tech rehearsal
from the TED talk there was a swarm of
bees in a public school near me so this
story is then used to gossip about us
it’s sold to companies and used when
it’s not in our interest it’s used to
sort us to categorize us to market to us
to advertise to us it might be used to
guess whether you’re a depressed teenage
girl open to certain types of
advertising are you in economic distress
and a good target for credit card ads or
for-profit college ads have you been
looking at medical symptoms and can they
offer you a cure these are not our idle
kind of neighborhood middle school
gossips these are professional gossips
they are selling this information to law
enforcement companies that want a
product market to us to future employers
to politicians that want your vote so we
have the same characters we dealt with
in middle school we had this trusted app
or trusted website that we
initially shared the information with we
had those trackers in the purple box
eavesdropping listening in when they’re
not invited and here we have a gossip
the data aggregator using information
when it’s not in our interest it’s worth
remembering why our parents warned us
about the dangers of middle school and
why scholars from law scholars to
philosophers to computer scientists warn
us about privacy online right now and
this is because privacy is best
understood as our ability to both share
information while having it protected we
share information knowing who’s going to
get that information and how it’s going
to be used this is important because we
need to share information with people
that we trust both like athos worried
about his royalty status being too loud
of a signal for friends but also we need
to trust the other party not to use that
information to harm us to manipulate us
or make us vulnerable and this is
important because sharing information is
actually key to developing who we are
it’s how we process events we talk
through them it’s how we develop
different types of relationships form
groups and social bonds it’s how we
develop a sense of autonomy if the
opposite were the case if the only way
to protect our information to risk
withhold it keep it away from society
this in many ways goes against our
instincts and being social and is
actually one of the worst punishments we
can devise is to force someone to
withdraw from society or even worse to
kind of go into solitary so you can see
we have this tension we have these
reasonable expectations to know how
information is being gathered and used
and yet we have a business model that
assumes that we don’t care the market
approach sends something from a business
school is to stop feeding the gossips
this is the same advice your parents
probably gave you in middle school so if
we go back to that website that I showed
you earlier if I actually turn on the
blocker this is actually a product
called gostrey as in witches and ghosts
gostrey there are many other blockers
out there that you can they’re free I
can like to make my brothers go away but
I can I make the ad go away but more
importantly I actually make the number
of track hoes get smaller and then the
ones that are there or
greyed out meaning they’re being blocked
so I’m blocking the eavesdroppers from
listening in now second we can actually
withhold our business from companies
that we find to be untrustworthy and
this actually works in 2016 a number of
websites tried to force users like
myself to turn off these products these
blockers and enough people turned around
and walked away that the websites had to
reverse their policy so with both
holding our business from companies we
find on trustworthy works in the long
run but those gossips are tough because
we don’t have a relationship with the
data aggregators so it’s hard for us to
pull our information back but I’m going
to say two things that should give us
some hope first they don’t admit this
but companies know that
Trust is necessary for sharing
information they know this because
companies themselves develop
relationships like joint ventures and
alliances and partnerships and they
spend a ton of time and money doing it
that allows them to share information
like their forecasts what they need in
the future what their concerns are what
there’s going on in their business this
trust is necessary to protect that type
of information because this is key that
type of information can be used to make
to manipulate them to make them
vulnerable in the marketplace so this
argument that the free flow of
information is necessary for market
efficiency is an argument business only
uses for consumer data this is not an
argument they use for themselves so we
need to put that argument into context
and I just mean ignore it we should just
ignore when they say that second we’ve
actually heard many of these arguments
before we as society call out bad
behavior and businesses first response
is no no no this is necessary for our
business model we hear this right now
all the time with privacy and we
actually heard it decades ago with
pollution so when the Environmental
Protection Agency was first started in
1970 it was called the worst enemy of
business the clean air and the Clean
Water Act were called unreasonable and
unrealistic any attempt at Technica
regulating pollution was considered
technically impossible and would cause
business to lose hundreds if not
thousands of jobs they said so how is
that a river on fire
hopefull well those same companies that
were actually in denial about the role
of pollution eventually became compliant
with the clean air and the Clean Water
Act and the best started using
sustainability as a source of innovation
and a competitive advantage so we need
to see these initial arguments that
businesses making as just the process by
which they reconcile their current
practices with the social norms and
values that we espouse so the companies
that are in denial about their role with
privacy eventually will become
respectful and compliant with our
privacy expectations and the best will
actually use privacy as a source of
innovation and a competitive advantage
so our role in making that hope I just
described a reality that cloud we look
out into that abyss is actually made up
of very distinct characters we need to
identify the trusted confidants we need
to identify the eavesdroppers those
trackers and we need to identify the
gossips the data aggregators this allows
us to use different tactics for each and
it really lets us focus in on those data
aggregators gossiping about us and using
our information when it’s not in our
interest we have reasonable expectations
to know how information is both gathered
and used this allows us to develop as
individuals and develop relationships we
need to demand more out of companies to
respect those expectations rather than
undermine them we should reward
companies that are trustworthy and we
need to block those who are not and
finally our response our response when
we hear about companies who want to
eavesdrop on us and gossip about us our
response needs to be that’s not your
story to tell
thank you very much
[Applause]
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